Marmalade

As a child I always was curious about a bear called Paddington who seemingly had a love for marmalade sandwiches and laugh at all the sticky situations that he got into. There was a house near my childhood home that used to dress up Paddington in different clothes and put him in their front window; we used to try to spot him every time we drove past, a fond memory. I used to wonder if he really did have a marmalade sandwich under his hat?

We have a regular farm box from Church Farm Ardeley (which I would highly recommend!). We buy all our meat, veg, fruit and eggs from them and it’s a great way to a support local business, reduce food miles in the supply chain for locally grown produce and eat really good quality food.

Last week we were delivered a bumper amount of oranges as part of our fruit order! As much as we enjoy them, we won’t get through all of them in a week so I decided to have a go and making some Paddington inspired marmalade. I did wonder if it would work or not as they weren’t Seville oranges but found this recipe on-line to and it looked quite straight forward:

What I like about marmalade is that it uses the whole orange and nothing is wasted. It’s good to be resourceful with what we have and a lesson to be learned on how to be mindful of this.

Ingredients

500g oranges
500g sugar
1 1/4 litres of water
Juice of 1 lemon

Method

Start by cutting the oranges in half and squeezing the juice. Put to one side.
Scrape out the the rest of the white part of the the oranges as best as possible, keeping the pulp to one side
Cut the oranges into tiny slithers called Julliens (I used scissors for this as it made it easier and quicker)
Put the water in the pan with the juice from the orange, the orange juilliens and the lemon juice
With the pulp put this in a muslin cloth, tie with some string and put in the pan. This will releases the pectin needed to help make the marmalade set.
Bring to the boil and let simmer for 30 mins
Remove the pouch of pulp, giving it a squeeze add the sugar and stir it until dissolved.
Simmer for an hour until the mixture starts to thicken.
After an hour, keep checking it every 5 mins to see if a little spoonful sets on a cold plate from the freezer.
Leave to cool for 10 mins before pouring into sterilised jars and leaving to cool completely.

I was surprised by how this turned out, better than I expected for my first attempt! It did only yield 1 jar which felt like a lot of sticky mess and I thought it would have made more. Having said that, with more oranges it would make a lovely gift to sell for £3 at some point perhaps at a Christmas fair and would keep for a long time with a waxed disc.

Bonus too that the glass jar is reusable and I’ll be writing some more posts on other ways to gift a jar.

I would be hopeful that even Paddington would approve of my marmalade on a slice of homemade bread.